How do we change who we’re really voting for?Strategic voting was a key part of the last federal election campaign. The new government has promised to reform the electoral system. What does a fairer, more representative electoral system look like?

Photograph of a polling station in Calgary, Alberta (credit: Josie Lukey)

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At the beginning of the most recent federal election campaign, the New Democratic Party, Liberals and Conservatives were in a tight three-way race with no clear winner. Pollsters predicted the NDP would come out ahead with a minority government; instead the Liberals won a surprisingly comfortable majority with 184 seats in the House of Commons.

Even longtime NDP incumbents were voted out in favour of Liberal candidates, suggesting a desire by left-leaning Canadians to overthrow the Conservative government. Better safe, many voters seemed to think, than sorry.

Strategic voting efforts this past election showed that Canadians wanted to change governments. But what this past federal election also demonstrated, for many, was the need for another kind of electoral system that enables Canadians to vote for a party they truly support and a House of Commons that is representative of what the populace wants.

The problem with first-past-the-post

Our current electoral system, known as first-past-the-post (FPTP) or “winner takes all” is one in which voters cast one ballot in their riding, or electoral district, and whoever gets the most votes wins that riding’s seat as a Member of Parliament. That means that a candidate can win a riding and become the area’s representative even if they get less than a majority (50 per cent) of the vote.

In “The case for electoral reform in Canada,” Professor Werner Antweiler of the Sauder School of Business at the University of British Columbia provides readers with an analysis of FPTP in Canada and different electoral systems in other countries. He says that FPTP has worked well for Canada because historically, we’ve only had two main parties. But now, our political landscape is more diverse and we need a voting system to reflect that reality.

“The consolations are basically hindering smaller parties from being heard and that’s really the design of the first-past-the-post system,” says Antweiler. “It’s giving a huge boost to the big parties and basically gives smaller parties very little ability to find representation.”

Take the 41st federal election, in 2011, where the Conservatives won a majority government of 166 seats with just 39.6 per cent of the vote. When taking the percentage of NDP votes (30.6 per cent) and combining it with those for the Liberals (18.9 per cent), Bloc Quebecois (6 per cent), Green Party (3.9 per cent) seats and others (1 per cent), 60.4% of Canadians did not want the Conservatives in power.

This election, voters seemed determined to not let it happen again.

Mount Royal University student Jennifer McDonald, who lives in Calgary, considers herself an NDP supporter, yet knew that the NDP candidate in her riding didn’t stand a chance against her riding’s Conservative incumbent (and former Prime Minister) Stephen Harper. McDonald says “desperate Googling” for advice on how to make her voice count let her to strategicvoting.ca.

Strategicvoting.ca is a platform that launched in 2008 to help Canadians determine who to vote for in order to “increase the number of seats won by progressive parties (Liberals, NDP and Green),” and avoid the problem of splitting votes between candidates on the left.

According to founder Hisham Abdel-Rahman, the site had had 800,000 visitors this election period. He promises to keep the site up and running until electoral reform happens.

“As long as we have first-past-the-post,” says Abdel-Rahman, “there will always be a need for strategic voting.”

There are other organizations intent on changing our electoral system altogether. Vote Pair, a website dedicated to “hacking the vote for democratic change”, was formed during the federal election in 2008 to bring attention to electoral reform. Fair Vote Canada, another campaign for electoral reform, strives to produce voting system reform for all levels of government.Both want an electoral system that more fully represents the population as well as focuses on local candidates.

The advocacy organization Leadnow launched their Vote Together campaign in the most recent federal election. Targeted specifically at voters keen to oust the Conservative government, Vote Together asked voters in 29 swing ridings across Canada to support the NDP, Liberal or Green candidate they recommended based on their own polling data. Though the campaign was not without controversy, it seemed to have the intended result. Their recommended candidate won in 24 out of the 29 swing ridings that they targeted.

Anthony Sayers, professor of political science at the University of Calgary, believes that it’s not uncommon for these movements and the desire of electoral change to arise when a party has held power for a long period of time. According to Sayers, Canadians are thinking “maybe making the system more responsive and not overweighting it for the largest party would be a good thing.”

The options

One of the alternatives that is being considered by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is creating a system based on proportional representation (PR).

Central to this system is the idea that the number of seats gained by a political party should be equal to the amount of the proportion of votes they acquire nationally. So, if 20 per cent of the Canadian electorate votes for a party, then that party will receive 20 per cent of the seats in the House of Commons. Depending on how this system is structured, it would eliminate the need strategic voting.

But according to Sayers, this system must take into account the size of the electorate and how big or small parties should be before they get representation.

Because Canada is “too big and diverse a country,” says Sayers, “we would most likely use a system of proportional representation based on provincial-wide constituencies.” This means that the government would have to convene a discussion about how many seats each new provincial constituency would be entitled to. Which, Sayers says, has the potential to create friction between provinces.

This system would ensure all governments, except in rare circumstances, would be coalitions. Theoretically, this would alleviate some of the strict partisanship of Parliament and encourage free debate. But it is likely that backroom deals would still be necessary for parties to ensure the 50 per cent plus one requirement needed to pass bills in parliament.

If Canada were to adopt a proportional representation electoral structure, it’s likely we would go with one of two voting methods within this structure: mixed member proportional representation (MMP), or single transferable voting (STV).

In MMP, voters get two ballots come election day and the number of seats in the House of Commons is doubled. Similar to our current system, the first ballot would allow citizens to choose a local candidate to represent their riding. Whoever gets the majority of the votes for this ballot would win the representation of that local riding, ensuring local representation in the House of Commons.

The second ballot would allow citizens to vote for a federal party, and this vote would decide the number of seats each party would have in the House of Commons. The number of seats given to each province or district would likely be relative to its population size. Candidates would be chosen from a party list that establishes the candidates in the order the party wants them to be elected.

For example, say there are ten seats in Parliament for MPs, five of which belong to local representatives and the other five to national representatives. In the first ballot, candidates from Party A win all five local seats by having the most votes. They will, therefore, get a minimum of five seats. In the second ballot that is based on the proportion of votes overall, Party A gets 70 per cent of votes, Party B gets 20 per cent, and Party C gets 10 per cent. Using this data, two more seats would go to Party A, two seats would go to Party B and one would be claimed by Party C.

STV is the electoral system which, according to some experts, is most plausible for Canada. In the STV electoral system, voters are given one ballot to elect local representatives –

similar to the ballots we currently use. The only difference is that voters rank candidates in order of preference.

When the votes are counted and a candidate is not above the majority line, the candidate with the fewest votes is eliminated. The corresponding voters’ ballots will be redistributed to their second choice. Therefore, citizens get to have their votes count towards another candidate if their first choice doesn’t win. This system repeats until a candidate is above the winning line, thus winning the riding.

For example, let’s say four candidates were running in a riding where 100 people voted. After all the first choice votes are counted, 45 people voted for party A, 30 people voted for party B, 15 people voted for party C and 10 voted for party D. Because there is not a clear majority, Party D will be eliminated and the party’s 10 votes will be distributed according to the voters’ second choice. If all of the second choice candidates indicated on Party D’s ballots were for Party A, it would now have 55 votes and it would win the riding.

What’s next?

Canada would have to systemically change the electoral system to allocate for more seats in Parliament using the mixed member proportional representation system – something that would be very costly. Moreover, in order to implement any of these systems, Canadians would need to educate themselves on the new system.

So far, three provinces –British Columbia, Ontario, and Prince Edward Island – have attempted to reform their provincial electoral systems, but these attempts were struck down in referendum votes. Both Quebec and New Brunswick have investigated and proposed new electoral systems, but no effort has been made to hold a referendum.

Sayers points out that once a government has power, it’s rare for them to change electoral laws “unless they think they will benefit from them.”

Nonetheless, any change could have a significant impact on our democratic institutions. Reforming the ways MPs are elected will reshape the political landscape, shifting the way that politicians campaign and eventually legislate, as well as the way they are elected. With the recent federal election having the highest voter turnout in decades, however, Canadians are making some of those changes themselves.

Josie Lukey is a journalism student at Mount Royal University in Calgary, Alberta where she is also minoring in political science. She is a reporter for the Calgary Journal and freelances for publications in the surrounding area where she can indulge her interest in political spectacle. Her interests include drinking black coffee infused with espresso shots and wondering if Banksy will ever reveal his true identity.

From 1870 to 1996, more than 150,000 First Nations, Métis, and Inuit children were placed in residential schools and forbidden to speak their language and practice their culture. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (TRC) estimates there are 80,000 former students living today, and that the ongoing impact of residential schools are a major contributor to challenges facing modern Aboriginal populations.

Canada’s TRC is one of many commissions worldwide to undertake revealing and resolving past wrongdoings, mostly by governments. Other examples include:

South Africa

In 1996, President Nelson Mandela authorized a Truth and Reconciliation Commission to study the effects of apartheid in South Africa. The commission allowed victims of human rights violations to give statements about their experiences, but also allowed perpetrators of violence to request amnesty from criminal prosecution.

Argentina

The National Commission on the Disappearance of Persons, initiated in 1983, investigated human rights violations, including 30,000 forced disappearances, committed during the Dirty War.

Guatemala

The Historical Clarification Commission was created in 1994 in an effort to reconcile Guatemala after a 36-year civil war. The commission issued a report in 1999 which estimated that more 200,000 people were killed or disappeared as a result of the conflict.

In June, the Canadian Truth and Reconciliation Commission released 94 “calls to action” to “redress the legacy of residential schools and advance the process of Canadian reconciliation.”

The scope of recommendations range from child welfare to education to Indigenous language rights, and has recommendations targeted for private and public spheres of Canadian life alike. The document calls upon law schools in Canada to require all students to take a course in Aboriginal people and the law, for example. Notably, the document calls upon the federal government to appoint a public inquiry into the causes of, and remedies for, the disproportionate victimization of Aboriginal women and girls.

Canada’s employment statistics are much better now than they were 20 years ago. In 2012 for example, 61.8% of working-age Canadians were employed as opposed to 58.7% in 1995. The unemployment rate has gone down from 9.5% in 1995 to 6.8% in 2014. Youth unemployment has gone down too, from 16.1% to 13.5% in the same time period. The outlier in these trends is labour force participation, or the amount of working-age Canadians who are either employed, or unemployed and looking for work. Right now, participation is at the lowest rate since the year 2000, mainly because the “baby-boomer” generation is moving towards retirement. Read more about that here.

Housing preferences among Millennials, however, tend towards smaller, higher density housing close to activities, signs that changing economic realities and the generation shift will create more demand for housing in compact, walkable neighbourhoods.

Belfry-Munroe suspects that youth disinterest has to do with political parties. “There’s been a lack of engagement one-on-one with people since the 1970s, and a greater focus on mass media and now things like social media,” says Belfry-Munroe. “The other thing is that parties have become uncool,” she continues, “and I think that getting excited about the election without parties is like getting excited about the World Series without the teams. If you weren’t excited about the Blue Jays, you would not be concerned about the World Series.”

To extend this analogy, young Canadians currently aren’t even interested in baseball. What could work to change this would be getting other types of fans — soccer, golf, darts, you name it — engaged in baseball due to their passion for sports in general. Politically, this is the bridge that is missing for youth. The Blue Jays don’t matter if youth are removed from sports. Similarly, political parties and leaders would have little relevance if youth are removed from electoral politics.

“The generational effect is even larger [than the life cycle effect]. At the same age, turnout is 3 or 4 points lower among baby boomers than it was among pre-baby boomers, 10 points lower among generation X than it was among baby boomers, and another 10 points lower among the most recent generation than it was among generation X at the same age.”

— An excerpt from “Why Was Turnout So Low?” in Anatomy of a Liberal Victory by Andre Blais, Elisabeth Gidengil, Richard Nadeau and Neil Nevitte.

Rock The Vote also published a Youth Voter Strategy Report in 2007 that compiled many scholarly findings on this subject. You can find that here.

According to Elections Canada, “people are less likely to cast a ballot if they feel they have no influence over government actions, do not feel voting is an essential civic act, or do not feel the election is competitive enough to make their votes matter to the outcome, either at the national or the local constituency level.” Read more here.

The trend of youth voter disengagement persists across much of the developed world. According to the Economist, for example, in 2010 just 44 per cent of people aged 18 to 24 voted in Britain’s general election compared to 76% of those aged 65 and over. America saw its lowest voter turnout ever in its 2014 midterm elections, where just 19.9 per cent of young people voted, compared to an overall turnout rate of 36.4 per cent. This trend tends to change, however, when charismatic politicians reach out to youth. According to Politico, Barack Obama would have lost the 2012 American presidential election without youth voting — overwhelmingly for him. Read more here.